NPR Music to stream new albums by Moby and Regina Spektor

NPR Music is streaming the entire new albums from Moby and Regina Spektor, weeks before their official release dates. Moby's album Wait For Me and Spektor's album Far will both be available at npr.org/music for free, on-demand listening, before they hit stores, as part of the site's "Exclusive First Listen" series.

Wait For Me, the ninth album from DJ and innovative musician Moby, will be available at NPR Music from June 15 at 11:59PM (ET) until June 30. Moby's inspiration for this work came from a speech made by filmmaker David Lynch with the message "creativity without marketplace pressure is good." Moby fully embraced this idea by self-producing the album solely in his home studio with contributions from his friends. The resulting album is a departure from his recent releases and has a much more personal tone. [For more Moby: check out his remix of the theme song for the NPR news quiz Wait, Wait.Don't Tell Me!, which can be heard at the show's website.]

Regina Spektor's Far, the anticipated follow-up to her gold-selling album Begin to Hope, will stream June 18 to June 30 at NPR Music. The new album showcases the musician's quirky piano-laden pop, vocal acrobatics and offbeat wit. Using four producers whose specialties range from rock to rap, Spektor combines intricately structured melodies with lyrics that convey thoughtful stories and ideas, creating refreshingly honest music.

Complete track listings and album information are available at NPR Music, where there are also extensive archives of concerts, interviews and reviews of Moby and Regina Spektor. NPR Music introduced its "Exclusive First Listen" series last year with Bob Dylan's 2-CD set Tell Tale Signs. The series is now one of the site's most popular features, and has offered pre-release streams of albums from artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Conor Oberst and the Dirty Projectors.

The "Exclusive First Listen" series is one feature of NPR Music, a free, multimedia music discovery Web site at www.npr.org/music The site offers content from NPR and 12 NPR Member public radio stations, including live performances, studio sessions, first listens to new albums, interviews, reviews and blogs. The site's continuously expanding sections are dedicated to rock/pop/folk, classical, jazz/blues, world and urban music. NPR Music culls from NPR's and the stations' extensive music archives to present thousands of features; more than 250 new features are added to the site every month.